Google Analytics is a fantastic free service that lets you monitor your website performance and the activities visitors take on your site. Tracking your website performance is a vital part of search engine optimisation (SEO), but it can become even more valuable when you start to track your online conversions.

A conversion is an action you want someone to take on your site. There are a range of conversions that you might want to track – such as when a visitor downloads an ebook, registers for an event, signs up to your newsletter or makes a purchase.

When you create a goal in Google Analytics, you are effectively telling it what your desired conversions are. When you get down to the nitty gritty; goal conversion are really the primary metric for measuring how well your site fulfils business objectives.

Setting up goals is easy. We’ll take you on a step by step walk through of setting up a goal – this example goal will be tracking when people complete a Contact Us form. All we need to know is the URL of the page people are taken to once they have completed the form. For this example we’ll use www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html. Most goal pages should be pages people only get access to once they have completed an action. So they’re most often thank you pages – thank you for signing up to our newsletter/thank you for contacting us, we’ll be in touch shortly/thank you for buying our product… etc. It’s important that you know the page/URL you want to measure and that visitors can only access this page by completing the desired action.

So…

1. Log into your Analytics account – on the Overview page, select ‘Edit’ on the right hand side:

2. Scroll halfway down and click on ‘+ Add Goal’ (your goals can be split into four sets, each with 5 goals = 25 goals in total overall. The image below is selecting to create the first goal in set 2):

You will then be presented with the following page:

Give your goal a name. For this example we can call it ‘Contact Form Completion’. Then select ‘URL Destination’.

You’ll be given some new fields to complete (below). In the Match Type field you can select either Head Match, Exact Match, or Regular Expression Match. You can find out more about the different type of matches here: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en_GB&answer=72286&utm_id=ad

Then enter in your goal URL, select if it is case sensitive or not, and then enter in a value for the goal. This is optional, but if you know that the conversion you’re tracking is worth a certain amount, it can help you get a better idea of the ROI you’re getting from your website.

If you have a specific sales funnel that you have created, you can set this up to be tracked also. For example, you may be directing people to a landing page (via Google AdWords or some other form of online advertising), they then click on a call to action button which takes them to a page with a form, they then complete the form and are taken to the thank you page. So your funnel looks like:

1. www.SMEketing.com/landing-page.html
2. www.SMEketing.com/landing-page-contact.html
3. www.SMEketing.com/thank-you.html

The funnel section is optional. Once you’re happy, you can click on ‘Save Goal’ and you’re done!

Tracking Goal Conversions

You’ll be able to track your goal conversions throughout Analytics. You’ll see a special ‘Goals’ section in the menu where you can see all the information and statistics.

You’ll also be able to track the goals on various other pages. For example

• If you look at the Referring Sites report, you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed from traffic arriving from various sources.
  • Did Twitter send 100 people with 68 conversions? Then you know that you’re getting a good ROI from your social media.
• Looking at the Browser report you’ll be able to see how many goals were completed by people using various browsers
  • Did more people using Firefox convert than Internet Explorer users? Maybe there’s an issue with your site in Internet Explorer?

Tracking conversions is an extremely important part of online marketing – if you can track what works and what doesn’t, how can you improve your marketing efforts?

As always with Google Analytics, this is a huge subject. If you have any questions about creating and monitoring goals, please leave a comment or email us on info@SMEketing.com.